For seven years, 365 has been telling the story of life in Dubuque for free.

And for the entire time, we have been actively pursuing ways to better support arts and culture in the Tri-States by donating our time, resources and passions to help their supporters achieve their goals. That likely has something to do with the fact that we live on macaroni and cheese and I’m still driving a 12-year-old SUV, now dented on most sides. Actually, I drive that because I still love it. But I am tiring of the mac and cheese. (That’s a lie, too.)

Donating time and talent to causes that can’t afford to compensate you doesn’t make you rich. But that’s only if you are counting value in dollars. If riches were measured in love and appreciation, then certainly 365 is rollin’ in it. I recently put together a few more websites for area arts groups and it made me go back and look at some of the other site I’ve done, the ways in which 365 impacts the cultural landscape of our community outside of the thousands of daily visitors to our website, Dubuque365.com, and readers of this magazine. Like the mighty Mississippi herself, they all seem like trickles, but in the end add up to a river.

I’m extremely proud of that and thought I’d share some of those successes with you. The mac and cheese, however, I am not sharing. Our staff has got to be among the most intensively socially, politically and organizationally active in the area, probably in the country. We serve on enough boards, commissions and civic organizations to choke Nelson Mandela. You see our event photography everywhere, often used to promote the same event the next year, and our logos and brochures pop up constantly. Most importantly though, you see us everywhere, whether you know us or not.

365 is ubiquitous in the Dubuque community and though it sounds like I’m gloating, I’m really just trying to say how incredibly proud I am of my people. They don’t do it because they have to. They are part of 365 today because they were the ones who did it anyway. It’s just a happy coincidence that involvement in civic activity often gets you fed, usually in hors d’oeuvres and snack mix, and that beats mac and cheese any day. Taking a look at one area that you can put down the paper and verify, 365 puts a lot people on the Internet. We strongly believe that organizations that are vital to the cultural health of growth our our community MUST have a web presence. You just gotta be able to find resources when you need them and when they are on the Web, they CAN be found.

Since our inception, if you met the criteria for our help and we had the time to do it (a condition that gets harder and harder to meet with each passing day), we got involved and helped. And we did it completely free. It was clear to us that it was just the right thing to do. It started shortly after we were conceived as a company, which entailed more or less just finally putting a name to what we have doing for a while anyway. We saw the the Dubuque Museum of Art had no Web site. Or the one they had was gone. With a massively tight budget at the time, it was probably one expense they could survive without, but not one you can thrive without. So dbqart.com was created by 365 to give the DMA a home online once again. We have hosted it free ever since. Next up was Main Street, Ltd. A real player in the growth and vitality of a reenergized downtown, and again, they were making their own miracles happen on a shoestring budget. As a political and economic player, they needed to be online but didn’t have the resources to make it happen. DubuqueMainStreet.com was born. We didn’t build the Dubuque County website for free, but we did make some complimentary software for displaying election results when they come in. The results you see in the courtroom on election night are the coming from our web-based program that is simultaneously available across the globe on dubuquecounty.org. No more having to go the the courthouse to see how solidly Dubuque voters killed a bond referendum.

Many sites have followed since for groups like the Dubuque Jaycees, Dubuque Cultural Alliance, the Dubuque Area Council on Foreign Relations, an America’s River contruction archive, Dubuque ... and All That Jazz!, Taste of Dubuque, Faces and Voices, Special Olympics, Fireworks on the River, ARC, DubuqueFest and dozens more. I can’t list them all here, there’s just not room. But I’ll put an abbreviated list on page 31 if you want to dig further. There’s some great infomation to be found out there. Some are fancy, some are not. Some are long-term, some were only needed for a few months. But they’re all out there. And that’s what matters.

Now I’d better say at this point, we don’t build free Web sites for everyone, and though many of you are worthy, we just can’t do them all. But we’ve made a good dent. We do, by the way, build Web sites for money too. It’s the work we do for those clients that allows us to do the free work for the others. We’ve LOVE it if you called us for that. Then we could buy mac and cheese for everybody!